Le Corbeau
The Criterion Collection, $29.95
If Henri-Georges Clouzot had made as many films as Alfred Hitchcock, he would surely be known today as the French Hitchcock, his name as iconic to cinematic history as fellow countrymen Renoir and Truffaut. Since word association best matches “Hitchcock” with Alfred rather than Robyn, sadly, Clouzot is more likely confused with Blake Edwards’ bumbling gendarme. Regard Clouzot (1907-1977) akin to the Pink Panther: a mastermind. Like Preston Sturges, who grew up in Paris, Clouzot’s all too finite filmography – some nine features, with additional credits as screenwriter – is notable for an abnormally high ratio of classics. While Clouzot revealed a wicked sense of humor, like Hitchcock he trafficked in murder and suspense, humanity dimly lit. Criterion’s previous Clouzot DVDs, Diabolique (’55), the gripping Yves Montand vehicle The Wages of Fear (remade by William Friedkin in the Seventies as Sorcerer), and particularly 1947’s dazzling Quai des Orfèvres, with its shocking finale, cue up like La Cage Aux Folles next to Le Corbeau. The writer-director’s second film was produced by Continental Films, through which Josef Goebbels hoped to pacify occupied France during World War II. Le Corbeau (’43), aka The Raven, couldn’t have landed farther from the mark. Introduced with the legend “A small town, here or elsewhere,” the Raven lets fly a poison pen campaign that leaflets a provincial community with a similar hysteria to that taking wing in Hitchcock’s The Birds. That no one, good or evil, is spared indignity or death, mirrors the gestapo’s pressuring citizens to inform on the French resistance. A critical and commercial hit, Le Corbeau came home to roost after the war: The director was branded a collaborator and banned from making films for several years. Period essays for and against beheading Clouzot, plus an interview with Bertrand Tavernier, acquit Le Corbeau as a triumph of filmmaking. Remember that name, Clouzot.
This article appears in April 30 • 2004.
